Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/139

131 substratum to language when it is spoken rather than written. Quaverings in the voice, alterations in pitch, breathing, stammering and so on can be heard, and such factors can convey states of feeling in a way which does tend to be universal to all humans, biologically-determined and in that sense "necessary" rather than "arbitrary". This aspect of language is normally lost when the spoken word is translated into writing. Yet it can be of considerable importance in the communication of emotions, being an essential ingredient of, for example, the song. In his "transrational language", Khlebnikov was interested in "uniting people", appealing over the head of "the government of intellect" direct to the "stormy people of feelings". He was attempting to bring to the fore those aspects of language which exert a direct or "magical" effect on the emotions and which are generally missing in the "fossilized" written word.

In oral language, then, the relation between sound and meaning seems more "necessary", less "arbitrary" than is the case with the written word. Khlebnikov in his "transrational" experiments takes the idea of a necessary sound—meaning correlation to extremes. He insists that the very material, the substance of "transrational language" is itself meaningful. As Yuri Tynyanov puts it,


 * for him no sound is uncoloured by meaning.

More specifically, his "transrational language" is based on the idea that each consonant, as a sound, embodies a meaning which is inseparable from it. In actual fact, so far as language is distinctively human, this is not the case: the meaning of a consonant depends on its position in a word and varies according to convention. Although within a given language there may be a certain tendency to associate particular consonants with a number of consistent areas of meaning, in general each consonant is meaningless in and of itself.